Fish of the Week

by Steve Braunias

  APRIL 16

  It’s 4.30 a.m. and I’ve been reading an interesting thread on that always lively blog by Te Rauparaha. The subject is the failings of the mainstream media. I tried reading it when I got home this afternoon but the neighbour’s dog ruined my concentration. It’s a very small dog and is tied to a very short leash. ‘Yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap,’ it yapped. ‘Yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap!’

  APRIL 18

  Today’s post is written to the soundtrack of The Bossa Nova: Exciting Jazz Samba Rhythms Volume 3, New Orleans Funk: The Original Sound of Funk Volume 8 and The Paris Concerts 1965–1966 Volumes IX–XXIII by Ornette Coleman.

  Actually I don’t feel very well.

  APRIL 30

  Someone needs to hold the mainstream media to account, or we’d all die in a screaming heap. Upon doing today’s crossword in the Bugle, I find that the clues for two down, three across and nine down all share blatant right-wing tendencies. I have emailed the editor eighteen times to demand an explanation.

  MAY 4

  The saddest sentence on the blogosphere is: ZERO COMMENTS. It’s been two years since anyone has commented on my blog, but in all that time I’ve contributed countless times to threads on blogs by Te Rauparaha, Howick Asian, Angry Negro, Aro Valley Confidential, Splitting Headache, Blather, Whine, Yap and Moo.

  So I’m looking at the back of the shampoo bottle and it’s speaking to my router and I don’t like what it’s saying.

  MAY 10

  Still no word from the editor of the Bugle. She’s a disgrace to journalism. Today’s post is written to the soundtrack of What’s For Dinner: Medley for Spoons Banging On A Tin Pot, Volume 4. Darn a pair of socks without a needle and read a very interesting thread. Other topics on the blogosphere today are here, here, and over there. It’s 5.15 a.m. and I haven’t felt this good in a long time.

  MARTOBER 37

  Most of you will have noticed that I haven’t been blogging with my usual frequency. The reason for this is that I’ve been transferred to a high-security ward. Today I was approached by a long-time inmate who was foaming at the mouth. ‘Nice to meet you,’ he said. ‘I’m Te Rauparaha.’

  [May 4]

  The Neighbourhood

  The shy and frail woman who lives three doors down usually thanks me for mowing her lawns by quietly leaving a bag of carrots in my letter box. The last time it was two onions. It can be a strange experience to sort through bills and vegetables, but I have come to place it as a not untypical symptom of life in Point Chevalier. Passersby register only that the suburb has a beach. The rest of the neighbourhood can seem just another ambiguous blot within Auckland’s suburban sprawl. But it has its own special characteristics. Flat, sunny, half mad, Point Chevalier does its best under trying circumstances, and always comes up smelling, at the very least, of onions.

  I walk the streets at all times of day and night, and feel no fear unless it is in the morning, when the resident population of the lost and damaged are at their most volatile. Psychosis is a thriving industry in Point Chevalier. The jewel in the crown is the Mason Clinic. Its mission statement reads: ‘To achieve a world leading service with people who have a mental illness within the context of criminal offending.’ As an illustration of that context, a lunatic attempted to scalp the local barber last year. The barber shut up shop soon afterwards and it is said he found much safer employment as a long-distance truck driver.

  The suburb also boasts a rehabilitation centre and haemodialysis unit; the old fire station is now a boarding house. It’s around the corner from the library, which is bordered by shrubs. I saw a woman standing there early one morning last week. I assumed she was admiring the plants until she bent over and threw up. She wore a pair of tracksuit pants with a message written on the behind. Her left cheek read WHAT and her right cheek read EVER.

  The enormous man with a shaved head who lodged his wheelchair in the middle of the pavement and wore around his neck a sign that read $2 OR MORE PLEASE, the five waxy youths who sat at the table next to me in the local tea room, not saying anything until a girl stood up and said to her friends in a listless drone, ‘See you back in the ward’—they are carrying on a great tradition in Point Chevalier. In 1864 work began on a mental hospital in the suburb, to replace an institution in The Domain. Newspaper report, March 8, 1867: ‘This morning the insane are to be moved to the new Lunatic Asylum.’ It was set in lovely countryside. As well as the 105 male and 57 female patients, there was room to farm pigs and a dairy herd; stock were regularly exhibited at pastoral shows throughout New Zealand, and admirers surely held back from snickering about mad cow disease.

  The hospital closed in 1993. It is now the Unitec Institute of Technology campus. A plaque inside the front door of the administration wing reads: ‘We acknowledge the previous residents with respect.’ You don’t have to be mad to work there, but it helps: students at the performing arts school recently staged a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in the women’s ward of a lunatic asylum.

  Although nearly 10,000 students are enrolled at Unitec, their presence is seldom felt in the suburb. The elderly seize the day and clog the gloomy, narrow aisles at the supermarket. There are the famous John A. Lee state housing flats for senior citizens, and Selwyn Village claims to be one of the largest retirement centres in the southern hemisphere. An old boy and his deaf sister visit the local tea room once a week. ‘It’s my birthday today,’ he told me recently. I said, ‘Congratulations! How old are you?’ Dejectedly, he said, ‘I don’t know.’ His sister shouted, ‘What?’

  He looked nearly as old as the suburb. It was founded in 1861, and named after Captain George Chevalier, a musketry instructor. It became entrenched as working-class. Its most famous son is the Mad Butcher. But wealth was always going to sniff out this neck of the woods. Prosperity is attracted to anywhere near sand, and Point Chevalier has the prettiness of all New Zealand settlements by water. The sky thins out over the bay; a lava reef reveals itself when the tide seeps out over the mudflats. The beach was first called Rangimatarau, or ‘The day of 100 spears’, after a massacre in 1793. Over a dozen beachfront houses went for over one million dollars last year. Even in a recession, $400,000 will buy you only half a shack with a pristine view of the motorway.

  The bay, the reef, the lake at Western Springs; there are spotted doves, and shining cuckoos appear in spring at Oakley Creek; in all seasons, a man navigates his wheelchair with a tube in his mouth and a woman rides a bicycle while wearing a wartime gas mask. I feel completely at home. Point Chevalier slips in and out of two New Zealands. It sits on the fence between downtown and the endless west. The real estate is prohibitive but the past is close behind in this aspirational and rundown suburb, which once had a tannery, a lime works, a duck farm that ran 8,000 fowl, and Chinese gardens that were fecund with cauliflower, cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, and onions.

  [May 11]

  Gauguin’s Teeth: The Sequel

  Every now and then I regret passing up an opportunity earlier this year to find fame and fortune as an international scholar of Paul Gauguin. It could have been a fabulous adventure. It could also have led to infamy, and the misfortune of a term of imprisonment.

  It began when I read about the discovery of four rotten teeth in a pit on the Tahitian island of Hiva Oa. The teeth had once chattered inside the mouth of Paul Gauguin, who had lived on the island and is buried in the village of Atuona. The find, according to art historians, was ‘exciting’. I thought: Oh, for Christ’s sake. And so I wrote a column claiming that I had travelled to Hiva Oa in the search for more of Gauguin’s buried treasure—and dug up an old biscuit tin, which contained two more rotten teeth, one red sock, one blue sock, and, most excitingly, a diary that Gauguin had kept of his ten-day visit to New Zealand in 1895.

  The pages described an eventful stay. Gauguin was beaten up on Auckland’s North Shore, experienced profound despair in Palmerston North, and attended the hanging of Minnie Dean in Invercargill; he
pondered the age-old mystery of missing socks, and rotted his teeth while eating biscuits in lonely hotel rooms.

  It’s true that the great painter had stopped here for ten days in August 1895, signed the visitors’ book at the Auckland Art Gallery, and taken a deep interest in Maori art. But the diary I claimed to have found was clearly preposterous. Gauguin’s last entry read, ‘The colony is cold, suspicious, aggressive … Good biscuits, though.’

  No one, I reasoned, would believe a word of it. But then the emails began arriving. A man called David wrote, ‘I look forward to the diaries being published. As I’m sure others have informed you, the biscuits that he so enjoyed were quite likely the good old Kiwi scone.’

  Warren emailed to ask whether I might authenticate an unsigned painting of a Pacific island. ‘The age of the board and the knife technique which has been used really hint at the work as being that of a very competent artist of that French Impressionist period. While I do not think it is the work of Gauguin, I understand that he had some of his fellow artists visit him at the Marquesas Islands … I would be interested to hear your views as you seem very much a person who acts on instinct.’

  Pat emailed, ‘I am completing a degree in fine art and my dissertation is about Maori art. I have done quite a lot of research and found it incredibly interesting, but my all-time favourite painter is Gauguin … I will look out for the diaries being published later in the year. Maybe you could drop me a line with any updates.’

  The most disturbing response came from a senior academic of romance languages. He had Business To Discuss. I was all ears. He wrote saying that he had phoned his publisher in Italy (‘I woke her up’) to pass on my news: ‘She specialises in diaries and correspondences of writers and artists from all countries and from all languages. She’s just done a wonderful book on Samuel Beckett … She’s very interested in doing the Italian edition of Gauguin’s diary, including as an intro a piece about you and your discovery. Let me know whom she should contact to buy the rights for Italy and she’ll do it straightaway.’

  As well, the professor had called an Italian newspaper, which commissioned him to conduct an interview with me—he could translate it from English. And might I be able to attend the Wellington launch of one of his translation projects? It would be opened by Helen Clark.

  I toyed with him for a few days via email. But there is something cold-blooded and snide about hoaxes. I phoned him up and asked him if he knew the English phrase, ‘Are you sitting down?’ He didn’t. I explained it, and then broke it to him that the Gauguin diary was a joke, a fiction, a nonsense.

  He took it well. He took it too well. He liked a hoax; he was now even more determined to get the diary published. He would get in touch with another, more gullible, publisher in Switzerland, who would jump at it. But what I needed to do, he said, was claim that what I’d found was actually a typewritten copy, in French, dictated by Gauguin to someone else. This way I would avoid detection by experts in Gauguin’s handwriting. Could I get my hands on a late nineteenth-century typewriter and writing paper? He could translate whatever I wrote into French; but to give the diary an appearance of age, I would need to bury the pages in my backyard for a few days, perhaps a month…

  Madness. Of course I was sorely tempted—interviews in the Italian press, the prospect of Swiss francs in my bank account. I made inquiries about antique typewriters, I eyed up the rich earth of my vegetable garden. But I didn’t go any further. I discussed it with my lawyer. He advised against it. He mentioned words like ‘fraud’ and ‘arrest’. Worse than that, though, the whole scheme felt so artless. I thought: Let Gauguin, and his foul teeth, rest in peace.

  [June 9]

  Birdland

  The white-backed magpie is viewed as a thug and a brute, and, worst of all, a nasty piece of Australian work. Shipped across the Tasman in the nineteenth century to control crop pests, it’s now regarded as the worst kind of immigrant. It laughs in our New Zealand faces with its raucous quardlings; it butchers native birds; it attacks innocent passersby; it sets up home and killing field wherever it pleases. Is there another bird as feared and loathed? Or as musical, clever, adaptive, well-dressed, and unfairly maligned?

  Two new instances of magpie behaviour feature in the latest issue of the New Zealand Ornithological Society’s splendid journal, Notornis. Both reports are speculative and probably inconsequential, but they make fascinating reading, and deserve to prompt further debate about the magpie’s right to a peaceful life in its adopted country.

  Kevin Parker, who works at Massey University’s Albany campus, records an incident when he observed a magpie with a female blackbird in its bill. It was 7.40 a.m. He watched the magpie feed on the blackbird’s back and head for twenty minutes. He does not say whether he was late for work. Inspecting the dead bird, he found one eye was pecked out, and its skin had been opened from the back of the head to the middle of the back.

  At first glance, there is nothing startling about any of this. A major study published in Notornis in 2005 listed forty-five bird species, including sparrows, kingfishers, chickens, hawks, wood pigeons, tui and blackbirds, killed—or, more commonly, chased—by magpies. But the drama of Parker’s observations is that he noticed blackbird feathers and droppings in a passageway separated by two glass doors. ‘One explanation,’ he writes, ‘is that the magpie had trapped the blackbird in the doorway and then killed it.’

  No doubt this appeals to magpie-haters, because it suggests something truly appalling. You can see the prosecution getting to work on presenting its case against the magpie: that the bird showed murderous intent, figuring out the angles and the physics, before launching its attack. Well, perhaps. But the authors of the 2005 study in Notornis commented: ‘The numerous published observations of magpie attacks are apparently biased heavily towards sensational events that are rare.’ In short, the death in Albany may have been a one-off, a random killing, a meaningless event. Another three and twenty blackbirds killed in similar fashion would supply a nice pie, as well as a more convincing case that magpies are active predators.

  The second magpie report is by Jennie McCormick of Auckland’s Stardome Observatory. She noticed an adult magpie at the base of a large Japanese cedar tree behind the observatory on One Tree Hill. ‘I saw the adult pick a slender stick off the ground with its bill and poke it into the trunk of the cedar. The stick was held straight in its bill for several seconds before being dropped.’ Nothing else happened. She concludes, ‘I interpret the behaviour as potentially the first observation of tool use in the magpie.’

  Maybe the bird was attempting to carve its initials. Magpies are quick learners, and quite ingenious: a comprehensive survey of their behaviour, published in Notornis in 1945, gave instances of tamed magpies that could talk, cluck, bark and whistle: ‘A favourite tune seems to be “There’s Nae Luck Aboot the House”.’ In Sumner, a cat with four kittens adopted a young magpie, which was cleaned in its turn, and slept with the family.

  But that same survey refers to magpies that ate honeybees in Springfield and trout in Woodville, and killed twelve lambs in Kaikoura in 1918, and picked out the eyes of hoggets caught in snow in the Upper Wairau valley in 1943. As well, a shepherd’s horse lost an eye in Gisborne, and a boy lost his eye at Pleasant Point. More recent crimes include three banded dotterel chicks attacked and eaten on the Ohau River, and a kaka that was driven to the ground and killed near Wanaka.

  Magpies are unprotected by law; Gun City in Christchurch offers shooters an $18.95 cassette of magpie distress calls. It’s an established fact that magpies are especially aggressive during their July to September breeding season. Last year a Christchurch man, Gareth Holebrook, launched a campaign ‘dedicated to exterminating magpies in New Zealand’. He was cycling in Banks Peninsula when a magpie hit his helmet from behind, and knocked him off his bike. The poor devil suffered a broken clavicle and a strained groin, among other injuries.

  Meanwhile, the sensitive flowers at the Royal Forest and Bird Protect
ion Society are forever whining about the ‘destructive habits’ of magpies, and demanding eradication of the birds anywhere near native species—despite the fact that a recent four-year survey by Landcare Research recommended that local authorities not bother wasting their money on magpie control programmes, on the basis that magpies inflict minimal harm to native populations. As the 2005 Notornis study reported: ‘It is generally untrue that magpies are predators which kill and eat other birds.’

  Give the magpie a break. ‘One of the most useful birds to the farmer,’ wrote the great ornithologist W.R.B. Oliver in 1955. And this from the 1945 Notornis study, quoting a resident of Cheviot: ‘Forty years ago my father strictly protected the first pair that nested in our plantation, and he remained a champion of the magpie all his life.’

  [June 22]

  Guilty, Again

  Misery loves company, and company loves it right back. As long as a formal distance is maintained, there is always something appealing about being close to torment, anguish, pain. Art routinely supplies our demand for a bad time. Sylvia Plath’s final poems forever stand trembling at death’s door; Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream is so familiar it has become a kind of logo for angst; you might get away with saying that much of New Zealand fiction is preoccupied with the search for lasting unhappiness.

  But art is only ever metaphor. Real life—random, stupid, inexpertly applied—allows a more intimate experience of suffering. Public institutions ought to be ideal—places where you can watch and leave. Strangely, prisons and hospitals seem reluctant to install viewing galleries. Courtrooms, though, are open five days a week. Based on the principle that justice needs to be seen to be done, these weird palaces of punishment and judgement also serve to obey the public’s right to ogle.

  Why even bother to leave the house? A magnificent archiving project has made available the proceedings of every trial held at the Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court, from 1674 to 1913. There are some two million words and precisely 197,745 trials. This breathtaking record of violence, folly, madness, lust, deceit, false accusation, class warfare, religious intolerance and various assorted miseries makes for splendid reading this wet, cold winter.